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" The great apologist has to have lived large and wild. If he's going to kiss the world's boo-boos and make up, he'd better plant some bruises first. A master apologizer has to be a Lord Byron, a Rick in Casablanca, a Lee Atwater, anyway. "

P. J. O'Rourke

Great

Better

Plant

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" Corporate corruption has ecological merits. It's helping to preserve that species known as Democrats - thought to be endangered as recently as the year 2000. "

" When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me. "

" The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out. "

" You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can. "

P. J. O'Rourke

Despair

Middle

" A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?' "

" There's something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages. "

" Guns are the ultimate bulwark against government misbehavior. "

" People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth. "

" Disney's Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative. "

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" One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them. "

" The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they've shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative. "

" I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked. "

" One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history. "

" I don't watch much television. "

" Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. "

" The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff. "

" The people who despise America are the editors of the 'New Statesman.' Their green-card applications must have been turned down. "

" Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have. "

P. J. O'Rourke

People

Seat

" The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee. "

" I have never Twittered or Tweeted or even Chirped. "

P. J. O'Rourke

Even

Never

" Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers. "

" Space has always been confusing to politics. "

" Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders. "